Only comes out On coldest days Wild wind snaps My face into shape. Any passing stranger Notices cool change Friends embrace Challengers turn tail. It holds space Though never filled Gravitates to places Where eyes first locked Pockets turned inside out Lint was spilled. Gaze darts from butterflies To fleeting smiles Peering through the aisles Of best sellers. Silent goodbyes Are all that linger now.
View of snowy kunanyi / Mt Wellington from The Afterword Cafe.
The greatest deed of self love When in deleterious deficit Simply to write one's thoughts and feelings In a thousand different ways Then set about, daily, to treaure it.
Excerpt from Zoe Kean’s book ‘Why Are We Like This?’
She was grateful that hypnotised by the sun’s reassuring splendour and the sea’s incurable restlessness, her own nerves did not recoil and spring within her to destroy this moment of repose.
At four o’clock, conscious of his throbbing heart, Levin stepped out of a hired sledge at the Zoological Gardens, and turned along the path to the frozen mounds and the skating ground, knowing that he would certainly find her there…
It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sledges, drivers, and policemen were standing in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed people, with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and along the well-swept little paths between the little houses adorned with carving in the Russian style. The old curly birches of the gardens, all their twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in sacred vestments.
He walked along the path towards the skating-ground, and kept saying to himself—“You mustn’t be excited, you must be calm. What’s the matter with you? What do you want? Be quiet, stupid,” he conjured his heart. And the more he tried to compose himself, the more breathless he found himself… He walked on a few steps, and the skating-ground lay open before his eyes, and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.
He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart… There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all round her. “Is it possible I can go over there on the ice, go up to her?” he thought. The place where she stood seemed to him a holy shrine, unapproachable, and there was one moment when he was almost retreating, so overwhelmed was he with terror. He had to make an effort to master himself, and to remind himself that people of all sorts were moving about her, and that he too might come there to skate. He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.
Reading into you Searching endlessly For the same page The right script The best score The only beat In time with Imaginary Baton flick By some one called fate The world an immense Library of works I wander in that palace Of my mind for that one Story where we meet Before the final scene Where we crescendo to The lasting peace The rest of history
Count the stars of heaven 